115838-and-my-mind-just-went-boom
Content ---- I know :D 30 more shots at the luminous equivar... | |} ---- ---- You could get a flask of minor renown, don't be so negative, jeeze. | |} ---- ---- Better than the nothing you would have gotten. Why not look for the positive rather than the negative? Are you a fan of the game or no? | |} ---- True that. | |} ---- The hype didn't quite match the reality, as a fan of the game I am allowed to be disappointed with certain aspects of it you know. | |} ---- This has 0 to do with being of a fan of the game to be perfectly honest. And no, some things are not better than nothing. I have 1.2 million renown with nothing to buy with it, what's a flask really gonna do for me. They vendor for like 20c. | |} ---- If you're a fan of the game, you don't respond like the poster I quoted. | |} ---- ---- ---- If I can get a hamster ball for my Aurin :) | |} ---- ---- Yes. Both factions have a chance of getting each other's mounts from the boom boxes. | |} ---- ---- ---- Hmmm make them sellable on the AH. Boom, mind really blown. | |} ---- No No No ! *shakes hands* Then Chua compete with Humans to get grabby little paws on Box. Should make box tradeable to Chua only. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- I've been giving those out to first time levelers. :) At least they're some good for people -- all those minor flasks. This. | |} ---- If I could like this infinity times, I would. | |} ---- Meh, I set low expectations for them from the start. I knew it couldn't be game-breaking, so when I got the full Raidin' set, I called that a win (even though I don't wear it). Any runes and such are just just bonus. Still, the mount would be nice... :) | |} ---- A bit vitriolic, but I agree with the basic premise, as well as wanting to add this.... Boom Boxes are nice and actually I'd say they're fine for this megaserver implementation thing. But we've been months without any sort of return on our subscription. Hell, even people who didn't even do Sabotage got a beret (and I love the beret on Spenser). I understand people have been working on bug fixes and the megaserver will change how a lot of things are indexed. But since the squirg hat in July and the beret in August, our subscription has earned nothing but promises. Decent promises, mind you, but to be fair you can mollify your playerbase pretty easily with things that don't require a lot of testing. We don't need much but with the purchase of our sub in the month, it would be nice to get something that was just overall nice for buying in. Nothing big, but nothing that has every chance of not giving us what we want. A new housing plug, costume, or decor items for being subbed in October this year wouldn't take much beta testing, but it'd make staying subbed through the development process a lot more appealing for the masses. Just something to say, "Thanks for paying in this month. Cash shops make you buy these things for extra; we're giving them to you just for being here this month." Boom boxes are okay for inconveniences like this, as well as compensating us for the lost day. I would actually say boom boxes were fine... if we got some token for our loyalty for the months we play. It can't be that hard to beta test a halloween costume, for example, if everything else is on hold. And it'd make a lot more of us satisfied with that subscription price. | |} ---- ---- I would immediately delete any and all negative posts I have made about the upcoming drops if we were simply given the Halloween costume in our accounts, no vendor, no quests, nothing. Just a "hey guys, sorry we totally borked our scheduling. We'll get it next year, but in the mean time, here you go, for keeping us in business". | |} ---- ---- I will just never understand this mentality... why do we always fall back to the position of wanting more REWARDS? For doing nothing? I mean, I certainly don't get anything from my cable company for being subscriber other than the service (and even that is debatable...) So why should game companies be held to this sort of "loyalty standard"? | |} ---- ---- Or a t-shirt saying: "My characters made it to drop 3 and all I got was this silly shirt" LOL ;) ^This for sure!!! :) | |} ---- Or, if I can be serious, I'd really love the title "The Original" for all the people who were subbed all the way through til the new drop. The Original name Seeger | |} ---- That's funny. I thought that even the developers proclaimed that these boxes were not a gift but a form of compensation, in return for the inconvenience associated with the rollout of megaservers. What you have to do to get the boxes is tolerate the inconvenience. And given how many people have opted to stop tolerating inconveniences associated with this game, apparently many people disagree with your view that "doing anything" is a concept restricted to gameplay inside the virtual world. This is not a gift. I am not obliged to pretend that it is simply because other people do. | |} ---- I believe the standard he is encouraging in the text you quoted is an "honesty and transparency standard", as his focus in that text is about sincerity, apology, and compensation that has a transparent and clearly-defined value. | |} ---- ---- My views that they are being offered as compensation, with the obligate corollary that I have done something that entitles me to be compensated, match very closely with the developer's statements about what they are and why they're being offered. So... yeah. Yeah, I am for real right now. Are you? Edit: To be clear, my primary point was most emphatically NOT that it's silly to give us an RNG-based gift to compensate for RNG-based gameplay. For one thing, this is not a gift. For another thing, this has nothing to do with gameplay at all. It has everything to do with _honesty, transparency, and reliability_ in marketing and advertising of this game. | |} ---- ---- For the record, you're right about my 99.9% comment. So my apologies for that, and you're right to tweak me on it. I'll fix it as soon as I'm done writing this. now fixed. Thanks again, I do want to know when I get it wrong. But the reason you're right is actually part of the problem. I have no way of knowing what the odds of getting a big exciting jackpot are and neither do you. It's not transparent. The value of the BoomBox is known to the developers and not provided to us, even though the BoomBox itself IS being provided as a form of compensation--as stated by the developers themselves. In any other business transaction, would you tolerate the phrase "as a way to compensate you for the inconvenience associated with our activities, we have provided you with 30 lottery tickets (enclosed) in our in-house Sweepstakes (odds of obtaining prizes not specified)"? That's what this is. And if it seems small and petty to you, then I would guess that you don't view this choice of compensation as a trial balloon. My own past experience suggests otherwise. Gambleboxes are so obviously unethical as a business practice that marketing strategies rarely just toss them up in your face any more. They are introduced slowly and deliberately so that the accumulated weight of your past acceptances of them eventually becomes an argument against future rejection. Boom Boxes were introduced as a reward for those people who voluntarily chose to test the game. This is the first time they are being offered as compensation to the general playerbase. Those words have very different meanings in the marketing world, and it would be naive to imagine that they aren't watching to see how we react to it. The more players excuse it and defend it and insist that it's all just fine, the more the people who market the game view it as a practice that the playerbase will tolerate and incorporate it into the game's revenue streams. If you have not seen where that road leads, then I am very glad for you and hope you never do. I have been down it several times in the last few years, and it makes the negativity of this thread seem like rainbows and dancing jabbits in comparison. If a company wants to avoid negative responses to questionable business practices, they can do it very easily. All they have to do is stick to business practices that are both honest and transparent. If this company had done that here, they wouldn't be getting flak for it right now. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- That it'll take you a full payment period to open them all is neither ludicrous or coincidence. Never miss an opportunity to sink another hook into the customer ;). | |} ---- Well my experience with Boomboxes is they haven't been exciting enough to keep me around if all else failed. | |} ---- ---- I suppose this is true | |} ---- ---- Thanks, I appreciate it. ;) Well, you can of course separate the free day and the boom boxes as completely independent elements handed out for basically unrelated reasons if you'd like. But the devs haven't done that, so you are now arguing a position that they didn't take and that I've got no reason at all to go along with you on. The key line in the announcement is the one that reads "This is not standard maintenance, so in appreciation for your patience while we make this transition, we are giving a month's worth of Boom-Boxes (One per day for 30 days) and a free day of game time to all our players, with the additional time to be credited to accounts by no later than the end of October." added. I don't actually believe that this is an effort to compensate for anything having anything to do with gameplay issues, nor do I believe that anything being offered here by the management has anything to do with player complaints about gameplay issues. The only tangential way in which complaints about gameplay fit into my views is that I am glad that the devs are actually trying to provide some compensation for anything at all, because that is a welcome change from a whole lot of other recent communications that boiled down to "Yeaaaaah, that gameplay-related thing we said was gonna happen? Turns out it isn't gonna happen. Sorry." If you can point me to where you found my views on that one confusing, I will cheerfully reword things there for clarity--but to be clear, I do not think they're trying to use either the boom boxes or the extra game time to compensate us for anything except the megaserver launch itself and the inconveniences that may result from it. I also note that this would be the second time you've told me that I'm trying to link that compensation to gameplay issues, and the second time I've told you that gameplay's got nothing to do with it. It does. Unforunately, most of your perspective is focused on something that simply isn't relevant to what I'm talking about at all. This has nothing to do with whether players find the game fun or whether they do or don't like game design decisions. This has to do entirely with the marketing and business side of this game, and from that side of things this absolutely IS the same as a toaster from a business perspective. The game doesn't guarantee that it's fun, you're right. The toaster doesn't guarantee good toast, either. The relevant bit of your response is the stuff that I put in bold within the quote. The game's designers are telling you that they believe the "book cover" in your analogy will be torn a little as part of rolling out megaservers, and they're giving you these nice lottery tickets for the inconvenience. You can choose to reject the idea that this is what they're doing in spite of what they've actually said. But then you're reaching your conclusion in spite of their statements rather than because of them. If I may offer you some reading material that I believe is highly relevant to how your position is laid out, you may find this to be some food for thought. | |} ---- Yas, a subscription to W* isn't a product, it's a membership. It doesn't provide a product, it provides access to content. Like you acknowledge, there is no guarantee that anyone will personally enjoy the content; just like there is no guarantee that anyone will personally enjoy a gym they purchase a membership to, or the slopes at a ski resort they buy a season pass to. The only obligation that Carbine has to it's subscribers is to provide us access to it's content as long as we have paid our subscription. In that regards, the free day is recompense for the day we will lose to the update. There isn't any necessity to compensate us players any more than that; because besides that period where we will lose what we pay for (Access to the content) nothing out of our sub. agreements is violated. The Boom boxes are a gift, a gesture of good faith for the inconvenience. That said, I do want to applaud the time you took to present your ideas in a clear and logical manner :) (something of a rarity around here) | |} ---- ---- Thanks! And I agree with you completely that they don't need to compensate us with any more than replacement of the downtime that is associated with their direct actions but isn't associated with a routine maintenance. Their legal obligation is fulfilled. That doesn't change the fact that they did compensate us with more than that, whether they were legally obligated to or not. And since none of us have a legal obligation to keep our subscriptions going--and many many of their customers have exercised their legal right to drop their subscriptions--I think that it was extremely wise of them to do that. | |} ---- I'm inclined to agree that whether it's a gift or compensation is not really worth all the discussion it's already gotten, thanks for pointing that out. The main problem with the boom boxes for me is that they're gambleboxes being used once again as part of the game's marketing, in a much more widespread way than when they were used as a reward for testing. The fact that this was part of what they decided to use as compensation/gift/whatever concerns me far more than the act of being handed them as compensation/gift/whatever reassures me, regardless of which one they are. edits for clarity | |} ---- Fair enough, though I would disagree with the boxes being compensation per-see, I get your point. If I understand you correctly, you are most upset with the random nature of box contents; I personally think it's fine people, no matter how much we might think otherwise, love a good gamble :) in such a no-lose situation it's a fun thing for most folks. Obviously YMMV, but I appreciate Carbines sentiment. | |} ---- No. I'm upset by the lack of transparency. This is a gamble where the odds are unknown and unregulated, the exact opposite of what I'd call a "good gamble". As for this being a no-lose situation, I'll be sure to remind you that you said that when those boom boxes are being offered for sale in an item shop. | |} ---- ---- Because it would be just so darn clever to ensure that people who have proven able to articulate their rage be fed a steady stream of causes for rage ;). I leave it as an exercise for the interested reader to consider what the consequences might be to flag those accounts for a higher rate of desirable outcomes... | |} ---- Cherry picking eh? My local pizza place/visa card offers me rewards for being a frequent loyal customer, so why shouldn't a sub loyalty game like Wildstar offer the same? And for doing nothing? We're still here, a feat in itself. :P Personally I couldn't care less about boomboxes, don't feel entitled to them, but also not excited in the least that I'll be getting boxes full of random junk. | |} ---- Cause cannot eat WildStar. | |} ---- Chua logic needs reworking. :lol: | |} ---- They mentioned that something like a reward system is coming for being a longtime subscriber.. maybe similar to RIFT.. I dont know. | |} ----